Gaomi county is to Mo what Yoknapatawpha county was to William Faulkner. It is where most of his stories happen, and a land which inspired him throughout his 31-year writing career.

Many got to know of Mo when director Zhang Yimou adapted the film Red Sorghum from his 1986 novella of the same name, bringing to life a visual landscape characterized by red sorghum fields and a fiery setting sun.

Set in Gaomi, the story is the tale of a sedan carrier who saves the bride he is carrying from bandits, and later marries her. The wild, audacious man urinates in the local winery's precious barrels, but also later dies fighting against Japanese troops during World War II.

Editor Ye Kai has high praises for this work, calling it an ode to the power of life.

Mo left the army in 1997 and gradually developed a writing style all his own. History, family sagas, blood and violence are frequent elements in his most famous works, such as Big Breasts and Wide Hips and Sandalwood Penalty.

Howard Goldblatt, who translated many of his works and is an acclaimed scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, finds Mo's novels reminiscent of Charles Dickens' writings — big, bold works with florid, imagistic, powerful writing and a strong moral core.

He also sees parallels with works like William Vollmann's Europe Central such as Red Sorghum, with its historical sweep, and The Garlic Ballads, with the trenchant criticism of monstrous behavior by those in power.

In Mo's works Goldblatt see influences of the modernist Faulkner, the magic-realist Garcia Marquez, Oe Kenzaburo, and last but not the least, Francois Rabelais, with his "bawdy humor and scatological exuberances".

Not all were convinced that Mo deserved to win. Some writers and critics attacked Mo on his perspectives rather than talent, and cast doubts that he could be objective and independent enough when discussing serious social issues in his works. They believed his winning of the Nobel Prize was in direct conflict with his position as the vice-chairman of the official Chinese Writers' Association.

But Ye Kai disagrees and quotes Mo's 2010 novel Frog as an example. He argues that the plot tackles a sensitive issue, China's family planning policy. Mo's protagonist, the Aunt, helped deliver thousands of babies in Gaomi Northeast Township shortly after 1949, but in the 1970s and 80s', she became an abortionist as she imposed the family planning policy. In her later years, the midwife atones with the making of thousands of clay babies and reads Buddhist sutras to them.

"Some people think the book is an ode to the family planning policy, I don't think they really understand it," Ye writes in his blog.

In an earlier interview with China Daily, Mo said the conscience of a writer does not allow him to avoid the issue, and he hopes people will finally see that "of all things in the world, life is the most valuable".

Goldblatt says another important work, The Republic of Wine, is the most technically innovative and sophisticated novel from China that he has read. In a work full of his signature surrealism and rich metaphors, Mo traces an official who went to the fictional Republic of Wine to investigate whether the rumor that people are eating babies was true. Before he could start, local officials talked him into getting drunk and he drowns in a pit of excrement before he could do any investigation.

The novel is widely considered a satire against both the corruption of officials and the pedantic part of Chinese drinking habits.

Paper Republic's Abrahamsen appreciates Mo's poise between literary and analytic aspirations best.

"Chinese literature can often go to one extreme or the other," he says. "Either it's an exposition of a writer's opinions about a social issue, sacrificing literary value, or else it's a work that retreats from reality and plays games with imagination. I think Mo Yan has kept the balance."

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